Friday, April 12, 2019

Encouraging signs

Where we live, there are several ways to get to the county seat, as it were, the fabled city of Towson. You can risk your life going 6 miles on the interstate, or you can risk your smile going 5 miles on Joppa Road, which started long ago as an Indian trail among the Chipatooth Tribe.

I'm not saying that the road is bumpy, but NASA has been taking aerial photos of Joppa Rd to use as pictures of the surface of the moon.

Now, I know the problem is that crumbling infrastructure under the road - the corroded pipes that bring us water and take away used water - need to be repaired, since most of them were installed during the 19th Century. And a convenient arrangement between the utility people and the highway people guarantees that any stretch of road that has not been torn up for pipe work will be torn up and replaced just before the pipe breaks. Frequent travelers going east or west on Joppa Rd have come to know the work crews and the flag men and women, and can be heard asking how their families are doing these days as they crawl along.

I will tell you this much, though: all this roadwork and under-the-roadwork has been bad for the speeding ticket income. You can hardly get up to 25 mph before you see the dreaded "right lane closed ahead" or "left lane closed ahead" sign, and you have to merge more often than AT&T and Time Warner.

But not that long ago, just past the Taco Bell, I saw an interesting sight. Traffic was stopped in both directions, and I thought at first that the ultimate had happened, and the road crews had put up the "all lanes closed ahead" sign. But no.

There was a senior guy making his way across to the Royal Farm store, with one of those walkers to steady his gait. And the people had stopped to let him cross that busy road without having to skitter around like a tenpin! The first two cars in each lane had their four-way flashers on as the man made his way over to RoFa.

(They want you to call it RoFo, but that would only be right if the store was called "Royal Forms.")

But that made me happy, to see folks being considerate for the gentleman, and then to see this picture from that Foxnews channel:

These were kids - I didn't catch where they live - but they had come upon a guy with a rolling walker, but he had fallen down. So they helped him up and were escorting him home to make sure he got there ok.

Sometimes I think that the pendulum, the natural reaction to the nastiness and bile that permeates society these days, will be things like this, as people realize that we're all spinning around on the same planet and we might as well help each other along the way.